While at first qooxdoo 0.8 looks like a minor jump in version number
over the previous 0.7.3, the actual changes are huge. In particular the
UI capabilities as well as the developer tool chain were improved
substantially.

qooxdoo 0.8 features a complete rewrite of the GUI toolkit. It is state-of-the-art and supports all major browsers (IE, Firefox, Safari, Opera). The GUI toolkit has a layered architecture: on-top of a low-level DOM-oriented layer (that might be used as a separate library), it includes a large set of widgets and layout managers (perfect for building RIAs). Online demos are available.

Users can very easily implement additional custom widgets or layouts to fit their individual needs. Theming of widgets continues to be independent from the widget code itself, and now allows for virtually
unlimited styling possibilities, e.g. rounded borders, gradients, shadows. While qooxdoo comes with two new attractive themes, it is also easy to create custom themes, without any CSS knowledge required.

Besides the exciting changes in the GUI toolkit, the developer tool chain has also been improved to a large extend. It frees the developer from such tedious and complex tasks as compressing and optimizing the JS code, resolving dependencies between classes, using a JS linker to produce a custom build of the app ready for deployment. Some further highlights of the comprehensive, built-in tooling include: searchable API reference, internationalization, source code validation, unit testing, combined images, and much more. The entire tool chain is platform-independent: all that is needed is a working Python installation, which is trivial to setup on any operating system, including MS Windows.

We switched our enterprise apps to Qooxdoo two years ago so that we’d never have to deal directly with browser-specific issues again (we did consider another js toolkit first, but changed to Qooxdoo because of the API documentation and feature set). It turned out to be a great decision for us. Glad to see 0.8 is out. Awesome animation & theme improvement over 0.7. The Qooxdoo team is based in Germany, so the project is a bit under-the-radar here in the US, but I’d encourage people to check it out. It’s not a new framework. It’s been around for around 3 years and is now a mature, full-featured framework with great documentation.

I’ve used Qooxdoo (.7) for a few internal corporate apps. Worked very well. Particularly for when you want to emulate a rich GUI within the browser. I’ve moved companies but I’m planning on using the new version for another internal app. Congrats on 0.8 release, can’t wait to to see the improvements.